Is It O.K. to Mine Real Relationships for Literary Material?

By Francine Prose and Leslie Jamison

April 22, 2014

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. When Robert Lowell used his ex-wife’s letters for his poetry, Elizabeth Bishop told him, “Art just isn’t worth that much.” This week, Francine Prose and Leslie Jamison discuss what they make of mining actual relationships for literary material.

By Francine Prose

Writers need to be careful about putting their children in memoir or in fiction. We’re their custodians.

I’ve been asked this question so often I’ve begun to assume that the world is teeming with aspiring writers wondering what Thanksgiving dinner will be like after they publish that lightly fictionalized exposé of Mom’s actionable parenting skills and Dad’s affair with the babysitter. When asked, I usually reply: “Write what you want. People rarely recognize themselves on the page. And if they do, they’re often flattered that a writer has paid attention.”

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Francine ProseCreditIllustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

Do I believe this? Yes and no. I’m reasonably certain that John Ashcroft didn’t recognize himself disguised as the evil high school guidance counselor in one of my novels. But like so much else, this thorny matter requires consideration on a case-by-case basis. In Mary McCarthy’s story “The Cicerone,” Peggy Guggenheim, the important collector of modern art, appears as Polly Grabbe, an aging, spoiled expatriate slut who collects garden statuary. Guggenheim did recognize herself and was definitely not flattered; it took years before the two women were friends again. Write what you want — but be prepared for the consequences.

We can only be thankful that no one told Proust not to write disguised versions of people he knew; that no one advised Harry Crews, as he began “A Childhood,” to omit the fact that the inattentive grown-ups had allowed the kids to play a manic game of crack-the-whip that flung him into the hog boiler. Or that Caroline Blackwood wasn’t dissuaded from writing “Great Granny Webster,” a hilarious and terrifying novel based on childhood visits to her great-grandmother: a witch out of Grimm installed in a drafty British mansion.

Obviously it’s different if one is writing fiction or a memoir, but regardless of genre, it’s fine with me if grown children complain in print about their parents. Children trust us with the understanding that we will take care of them, and if we don’t, they have every right to write about us, or about how they saw us, which to the child is the same.

The one place I would draw the line again has to do with children: Writers need to be careful about putting their children in memoir or in fiction, for the reason I’ve mentioned above. We’re their custodians. I’ve used my kids in fiction, but cautiously: When our cat got lost, one of my sons obsessively drew pictures of the cat until it came back. I don’t think he minded people knowing about that. I was recently appalled by a novel in which I thought the writer’s adolescent children would not only recognize themselves but might be upset and even frightened by their mother’s version of their family dynamic.

From time to time, the subject of life versus art gets into the news. I recall some legal trouble over a character in Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar.” In the 1980s, a psychiatrist claimed that the character was based on her, and that the film adaptation falsely depicted her trying to lure the Plath character into a lovers’ suicide pact. Who could blame a psychiatrist for not wanting to be known as a suicidal teenager who tried to seduce the suicidal poet?

A recent surge of media interest has involved the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose multivolume memoir-novel “My Struggle” has been criticized for revealing too much about his close relatives. In a Paris Review interview, Knausgaard says the question of whether a writer ought to use his family as material is akin to asking the question: Would you save the cat or the Rembrandt from the burning house? He says we must save the cat, choose life over art — a somewhat surprising answer from a writer who portrays his own family in such intimate detail.

Asked a similar question about a hypothetical house on fire, Jean Cocteau said that he would save the fire: a facile reply on the surface but one that gets at the near impossibility of definitively answering the complicated question of what — and how much — we should reveal about people whose only mistake was to belong to the family of a writer.

Francine Prose is the author of 20 works of fiction and nonfiction, among them the novel “Blue Angel,” a National Book Award nominee, and the guide “Reading Like a Writer,” a New York Times best seller. Her new novel is “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932.” Currently a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College, she is the recipient of numerous grants and awards; a contributing editor at Harper’s, Saveur and Bomb; a former president of the PEN American Center; and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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By Leslie Jamison

What if this process weren’t necessarily one of extraction? Perhaps we could imagine it as alchemy, or confrontation.

Once upon a time, I wrote a story about a girl who was very sad (I was also very sad) and using men to try to make her sadness better (I was also using men to try to make my sadness better) and generally getting tangled in a convoluted brand of self-destruction (I was also — yes, that). The story ends with this girl giving a black leather couch to a man whose calls she has recently stopped returning. He once told her that a black leather couch was the gift he’d always wanted most.

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Leslie JamisonCreditIllustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

If I told you I’d once given a black leather couch to a man whose calls I’d recently stopped returning, you might think the story was based on real life. But the connection that real moment had to its fictional counterpart was more like Newton’s third law of motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The truth is, in real life I’d treated this man poorly. The couch had been my sister-in-law’s doing — she’d been moving a bunch of stuff out of the apartment we shared, and she had the movers drop the couch at the car-repair garage where this guy worked. (It was actually pleather, the first lie.) I didn’t even know she’d done it until he called to thank me. He said nobody had ever done anything like this for him, given him a couch. He said it was like coming home to a room full of rose petals.

It got me thinking: What if I had given him that couch? What if I’d been a person turned generous by pain, rather than stingy? So I wrote a story — created a kind of fictional terrarium — in which that possible version of myself might thrive.

I tell this story to suggest that writing doesn’t correspond to lived experience just by reflecting or deploying it. The relation can take other forms: inversion, distortion, opposition; not merely wish fulfillment but hypothetical catastrophe. Fiction offers a set of parallel destinies: a mother who planned fantastic birthday parties, a pet dog that was actually a fox, a sister who slept with the gardener.

There are two main perils when it comes to writing from personal experience: what it will do to your work, and what it will do to your life. There’s the danger that overly autobiographical writing will be hampered by serving too many gods (fidelity and artistry at once) or be crippled by the involution of its gaze, made less ambitious by the umbilical cord of its genesis in lived experience.

Then there’s the other kind of peril, the possibility of doing damage: The person appropriated as subject will feel his life wrested from him, sacrificed at the altar of art and handed back in some horribly distorted but still recognizable form. Even the phrases we reach for — “using” or “mining” our relationships — imply attachments turned to commodities, feelings traded for professional affirmation. They summon an entire landscape of emotion turned to hollow earth because we’ve plundered it — excavated the mineral lode of everything we’ve ever seen or forged or felt.

But what if this process wasn’t necessarily one of extraction? Perhaps we could imagine it as alchemy, or confrontation — like coming upon one’s own life as something glowing and mysterious in the dark. What if these alternative models suggest not strip-mining but some kind of agriculture, planting what was in order to watch the growth of what might have been? As for the crippling effects of the confessional — I happen to think what we’ve lived is infinite, and often leads us beyond ourselves anyway.

But the hypothetical isn’t compensatory. It always evokes the absences it shields from view: Whenever I read the couch in that story, I don’t see consolation or reparation but only the gift I didn’t give — the gesture I got credit for, but never made.

Leslie Jamison is the author of an essay collection, “The Empathy Exams,” winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Her first novel, “The Gin Closet,” was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; and her essays and stories have been published in numerous publications, including Harper’s, Oxford American, A Public Space and The Believer.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 35 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: When Robert Lowell Used His Ex-wife’s Letters for His Poetry, Elizabeth Bishop Told Him, ‘Art Just Isn’t Worth That Much.’ What Do You Make of Mining Actual Relationships for Literary Material?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe